The official word is that the downtime, which comes just days after Office 365 went titsup, lasted from around 5.45pm on Tuesday until 4.30am on Wednesday morning.

However, many customers were still reporting issues today, despite Azure Support claiming that its engineers had "mitigated the issue in North Europe and impacted services should be recovered at this time".

That was tweeted at around 6.30am, but by just before midday customers have still been complaining about problems.

According to Microsoft, the outage lasted from 5.44pm yesterday afternoon to 4.30am when "customers using Azure services in North Europe may have experienced connection failures when attempting to access resources hosted in the region.

"Customers leveraging a subset of Azure services may have experienced residual impact for a sustained period post-mitigation of the underlying issue," the firm said. "We are communicating with these customers directly in their Management Portal."

The root cause, it added, was down to "an underlying temperature issue in one of the data centres in the region [that] triggered an infrastructure alert, which in turn caused a structured shutdown of a subset of storage and network devices in this location to ensure hardware and data integrity".

Engineers addressed the temperature issue, the status update added, and performed a structured recovery of the affected devices and the affected downstream services.

Nevertheless, many customers are still experiencing difficulties, with some complaining of lost business running into millions. Peter Jensbol, Azure Hosting and Operations Manager at Wizdom Intranet in Denmark, for example, suggested that his organisation had more than 40 customers unable to use the company's services.

Microsoft's ‘North Europe' region is based out of Ireland, which has been enjoying warm, but not exactly tropical, weather this week.

As more and more people jump on the Docker bandwagon, more and more people are wondering just exactly how we scale this thing. Some will have heard of Docker-Compose, some will have heard of Docker Swarm, and then there’s some folks out there with their Kubernetes and Mesos clusters.

Khosla Ventures and Y Combinator-backed open source Git repository GitLab is currently offline after suffering what appears to be a major backup restoration failure after accidentally deleting production data.

Khosla Ventures and Y Combinator-backed open source Git repository GitLab is currently offline after suffering what appears to be a major backup restoration failure after accidentally deleting production data.